[mention]sweetwaterbob[/mention] Thanks for the compliment!
I chose
Nicol Bolas, the Ravager over Kess because... I'm a Vorthos geek and have decks built around my favorite characters in the MTG storyline. And Bolas is one of those characters, despite his atrocious plot line and characterization in War of the Spark (still seething about that...). So, yup, it's mostly down to Vorthos preferences.
However, Bolas is also an outlet for infinite mana during the
Tidespout Tyrant loops. Once you achieve infinite mana by bouncing rocks, you can then cast Bolas, Transform him, activate his Plus ability, and then return him to hand via the Tyrant trigger. This also has an incidental effect of guaranteeing your win since you'll be Discarding your opponent's hands along the way. Once you draw your deck in this fashion (or a sufficient amount of it), you can then loop
Nicol Bolas, God-Pharaoh to exile your opponent's decks and nuke their life total. Or cast nu-Jace/Lab-Man and win. Or cast
Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker and leave your opponents with empty Boards and empty hands so you can win at your leisure. Or clear out your opponent's hands and Boards with
Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God and tick up to his ultimate after a few turns.
Additionally, when Bolas is transformed he has a natural minus ability that allows you to Reanimate any creature OR Planeswalker (making his other Planeswalker versions viable Reanimator targets!) with no life penalty and with no enchantment vulnerability, while also offering Board Control and raw Card Draw as well. This makes his transformed state extremely flexible and affords me a lot of different strategy lines based on what I have in hand and what's on the Board. Additionally, Bolas is a payoff for fast mana rocks. This makes the heavy mana rock count in the list purposeful and additionally useful since transforming Bolas quickly can generate some serious advantages in the long run. So far, my record is a T3 transformed Bolas and winning that game was pretty trivial.
The Wheel + Payoff package is also EXTREMELY powerful as well. Winning after combining
Notion Thief +
Windfall is pretty easy to do and simply a delightful experience for any true Grixis mage. I've selected a straight Discard Wheel suite so that I can build towards a nu-Jace/Lab-Man win while also fueling a Reanimator strategy.
Timetwister, while very powerful and the next cheapest "Wheel" effect in the game, undoes all the hard work I put into stocking my 'yard, so it's actually a liability in the long run.
The omission of Counterspells is intentional, definitely making this a High Powered deck and not cEDH material, so I hope it inspires you and other readers! Eventually, I'll be Primer-izing this so I can have Primers for the decks that I have in real life on MTGNexus. The creature suite could also be improved, but I like the current Reanimation target package as it includes some of my favorite Grixis colored creatures.